Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

Using real-time data on social distancing and lockdown measures, we can estimate the biggest aggregate of all, global GDP, on a daily basis. The result is a picture of extraordinary drama. For 2019, global GDP stood at something like $87.55 trillion. Over the course of a mediocre year, it had grown by 3.2 percent. In 2009, the worst year in recent record, global GDP had contracted by 1.67 percent. In February 2020, as a result of China’s shutdown, this huge flow of production contracted by 6 percent. And then in March it went off a cliff. Global GDP reached its nadir on or around Good Friday, April 10, 20 percent down from where it had been at the beginning of the year.69 Never before in history had economic activity contracted this fast and this comprehensively across the world. It was a more sudden and precipitous contraction even than during the Great Depression of the 1930s.